


And pray God grants you to be loved that way again

by Sheeana



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 22:12:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/pseuds/Sheeana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the early days of the Cylon occupation of New Caprica, Caprica Six and Boomer share something intangible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And pray God grants you to be loved that way again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kuruk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuruk/gifts).



> Written for femslash2012. Title is taken from a [poem](http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/loved_you_once.htm) by the Russian poet Pushkin.

“Callsign?” The deck chief had a pencil sticking out of his mouth, and he wasn't looking at her.

"Sorry?" Sharon Valerii was struggling with her gear, trying to cart it all on her back while a flurry of movement took place around her in the hangar bay.

"What's your callsign?" he said, looking annoyed - or maybe amused. Maybe both. It was hard to tell. He took the pencil out of his mouth and tapped the clipboard in his hands.

"Oh, uh. It's 'Boomer.'"

"Okay, Boomer, a few ground rules here: don't question me in front of my crew. If there's a problem with your bird, we want to know about it. And don't get your ass killed doing anything stupid; we mostly just do recon and supply runs here." 

"Uh. Yes sir."

"Welcome aboard, Boomer."

"Thank you, sir."

-

Sharon - no. Boomer opened her eyes. The same grey sun was shining down on the landscape outside. She could remember all the moments of her life with such intensity and clarity, even the false memories, but she couldn't go back. They could only go forward from here. She glanced up at the quiet knock on her door.

Caprica always came to see her in the mornings. 

They walked together to the edge of the river, where the bitter cold bit into their skin. They didn't feel it exactly as humans did, but they understood something of their hesitance to stay on this planet. It was hope, a chance for cooperation and a better future, but it lacked the light and sound and heat Boomer remembered so clearly. She glanced at Caprica and wondered if she ever felt the same. She'd been on Caprica - obviously - but she'd never been submerged inside a human consciousness. She claimed to love, but she didn't know what it was like to know that you were going to die forever.

They were different from their brothers and sisters, now. Their physical features were identical - Boomer's to the Eights, Caprica's to the Sixes. They were all flawless, none of them unique. The only thing that separated one from the next was the physical space between them, and even that could be overcome with the sharing of their experiences, their memories, their thoughts.

But they were still different. In her most bitter moments, she wondered, sometimes, if they'd finally discovered the element of human nature that made humans so unpredictable, so volatile. Experience, history, memory. They didn't mean the same things to Cylons as they did to humans. All of the Eights remembered Sharon Valerii's life, but Boomer didn't just remember. She could taste on her tongue all the foods Sharon had ever eaten. She could feel the rush of the wind through her hair, the first time she took a low flight out to sea. She could hear the sounds of the Galactica, the hum of life going on all around her at all hours of the day. She could still feel the touch of someone else's lips against her own.

"Are you thinking about something?" Caprica asked softly, peering over at her. They were nearing the place where they usually turned back, where the river rushed and tumbled through a series of pools and rapids.

"Yeah," she said, not quite ready to give up exactly what she was thinking. The other thing that made them different. They kept secrets, even from each other.

"What is it?"

"Just... thinking about how far we came to get here. And how far we still have to go from here."

"We've accomplished so much already," Caprica agreed.

Boomer wasn't so sure, but she bit her lip and didn't answer. She'd been human, or she'd spent a long time thinking she was human. She knew what Sharon Valerii would have thought about cooperating with Cylons. Sharon wouldn't be taking a walk along a riverbank with a Six, calmly discussing the state of affairs in the first joint human-Cylon colony. But Sharon wasn't real, and had never been real, so that left Boomer back at exactly the same place where she'd started.

"You're not alone," Caprica said quietly, seemingly sensing her thoughts. Of course she couldn't do that, down here, away from their base-stars and the neural networks. It still left Boomer feeling slightly unnerved.

Caprica waited, but she didn't get an answer or an acknowledgement. Her lips quirked into a smile as she approached Boomer. They walked back side-by-side, in silence. Whatever the thing they shared was, neither of had been able to put words to it.

-

A dark room. Hushed voices while the rest of the crew slept or worked. Hands on her body. Tugging at her clothes. Her back against the wall, hot breath on her neck. She forgot who she was, where she was, what she was. Only here and now mattered.

-

"They don't want us to tell them what to do." This was her newest insight, and probably the most frustrating yet.

"But they do see, they do understand? We can only create the future together," Caprica said, as if it was Boomer she needed to argue with. 

"Even if they do, it's..." Unsatisfactory, how she could never find the right words anymore. She was trapped in a place where she couldn't share her thoughts and memories along carefully mapped neural pathways, but there were no adequate words in human language to express what she wanted to say either. 

"We've given them everything they need, everything they could ask for. What more do they want?" Caprica was kneeling near a small patch of dull green, set against the expanses of grey and brown that lined the banks of the river. When she straightened, Boomer saw that she was holding a small white flower in the palms of her hands. She brought it to her lips and gently blew on it. The petals fluttered lightly in the wind, almost lifting off her hand, freed from gravity itself.

Then she crushed it. 

There was a word, on the tip of Boomer's tongue, but she shook her head to try to dispel it. She wasn't human enough to say exactly what humans wanted or needed. If she'd known that, she wouldn't be here now.

"Strange, isn't it?" Caprica murmured, "How such beautiful things can be so delicate..."

She took Boomer's hand and pressed their palms together, scattering the remnants of petals and pollen. Their fingers entwined. Sharing memories, but not the way they shared with their sisters. This was something new for both of them. Something learned.

-

A loud sound. The Commander patting her on the shoulder, like a proud father. Starbuck laughing too loudly. Helo telling her to ease up. The controls of the Raptor under her fingers. She'd always known where she belonged.

Pain. Galen's hands on her body.

Death was final, but she wasn't dying, she was-

She gasped for air and opened her eyes. 

-

"They don't want us here." She was sitting on her bed with her back to the wall, watching Caprica stare out the window at the rows of tents, a look of discontent on her face.

“Sometimes we must endure a test of faith," Caprica replied, after a long pause. It was immediately obvious that she wasn't only talking about the problems they faced with the humans. Not all the humans, anyway.

“Yeah?" She never did understand how Caprica could _love_ someone like Gaius Baltar. But wasn't that what made them different? Improbability. Unexpected outcomes to predicative models. Cylons didn't think in terms of could or should. There was only what was, what is, what would be. Gaius Baltar was as much an anomaly for Caprica as everyone on the Galactica had been for Boomer.

“God is always with us," Caprica said, and Boomer wondered, for a second, if she was even talking to her at all. The far-off look in her eyes often made it seem like she was conversing with someone who wasn't physically present. Boomer hadn't worked out what that meant yet.

"We'll figure something out," she said suddenly, impulsively. She had no reason to believe it was true, but she _did_ believe it was true.

Just as suddenly, Caprica was kneeling on the bed in front of her. "Something?"

Boomer swallowed. Caprica had always been good at creating a kind of tension, at making her nervous and calm at the same time. She stared up at her. Caprica's eyes held their usual intensity, not dimmed at all by the frustration of knowing that their plans hadn't come together as easily as they should have. Boomer pushed herself up against the wall as Caprica knelt over her.

Caprica's lips touched hers. She closed her eyes, exhaling slowly. 

She tried to relax, slide her fingers hesitantly and haltingly back into Caprica's white-blond hair. Clarity always came at the most unexpected times, but now she knew. This was the most fundamental thing they shared that made them different: what it meant to love someone who was inherently flawed. She exhaled against Caprica's mouth. She stopped resisting.

Resistance. That was a word they were all learning to hate. But Boomer was the only one who understood what it actually meant. 

-

She stood, naked, before the rest of her sisters, all of them identical, perfect, flawless. Her role in the plan was already predetermined. Soon she would forget, but it would only be superficial. She would always be one of them. After all, how could any of them ever be anything but what they were created to be?

“Close your eyes,” her sisters soothed, crowding around her.

“Will I remember?” she asked calmly. 

“When it's time.”

She closed her eyes.

-

The morning Sharon Valerii received her assignment to the Galactica, she didn't question how she'd already known what the paper would say before she opened the envelope. She just knew.


End file.
